When Sir Francis Drake invented other countries back in pre-historic times, he could not have envisaged all the other inventions that his British successors would come up with to make travel to other parts of the globe become so commonplace and fast. For this reason he set the time in these new places along the same lines as back in Blighty such that morning was the period around when the sun comes up then there is an afternoon bit to accommodate afternoon tea and an evening section when the sun says cheerio again. With all our modern conveyances and global communications we now know that when it is tiffin time in the UK, some locals are still frying up the bacon and eggs furthermore some of the lazier Johnny Foreigners haven’t even got out of bed!

Now consider what would happen if one fine day the ravens flew away from the Tower of London and as a consequence the world exploded killing the entire human race and foreigners at exactly the same time. The job of filling in all the death certificates would fall to some alien or other and we are going to look a right set of Charlies if not only the time of death is different for people in different places but in some cases even the date will be different too. But, they will cry, they all died at the same time – what an ignorant race these people were, no wonder the ravens hopped it! My friends we must address this so the time has come to standardize the time across the world to stamp out this nonsense.

But we should not stop there. At the moment if I want to ring my relatives back in Singapore I have to allow for the fact that they are 5 hours ahead of me. Imagine how much more convenient it would be if they were at the same standard time as me and instead of selfishly insisting that they go to bed when it is dark they reset their clocks to the same time as me and go to bed at 10.30pm which would be at the same instant around the world.

Yes, we should re-name Greenwich Mean Time to Greenwich Generous Time and share it with the world. Imagine the savings with all businesses, shops and offices being open at the same time. Singapore football fans would not have to get up in the early hours to watch the European Champions league and at last the Americans won’t be a day behind us most of the time reducing the time lag to a round number of 50 years. What’s more aliens will see that we are truly, a civilized nation!

(PS - What are we going to do now Humph has left us? I'm sorry, I haven't a clue.)

The champions league final will be on at 22.45 local time in Moscow. Can you imagine the state of the fans by kick off and the body clock changes the players will have to leglistate for to plan to play a game at that hour

Ah markhed, you are a bright one. I can see I am going to have to watch you.

This is my point exactly. The match will actually kick off at 19.45 London time (actually that is BST and not Greenwich Generous Time but we will not go into that just now) so by playing in Moscow both the teams will actually lose 3 hours of their lives by playing in Russia.

Luckily both the teams are English so they both lose the same amount but imagine if one team was Russian and the other English - the Russkies would have 3 hours longer to prepare for the match which would of course not be fair.

How much simpler it would be if the Muscovites, along with the rest of the world, reset their clocks to the same time. We could all watch the match, partake in tasteful celebrations for a Chelsea win and up the wooden hill to bed-fordshire after a nice hot cup of cocoa at the same time.

By the time news of our demise, exaggerated or otherwise, reach our would be alien funeral directors, we would have decomposed into little piles of dust. With luck, they might probably taste those piles, or even line them up into little rails which will quite likely result in them looking the part themselves.